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Hughes, Loyal Bush Adviser, Leaving State Dept.

WASHINGTON, Oct. 31 — Karen P. Hughes, one of the few remaining members of President Bush’s circle of longtime Texas advisers, said today that she will return to private life, stepping down as the head of public diplomacy at the State Department sometime in December.

Ms. Hughes is credited with injecting new energy into the administration’s efforts to improve America’s image around the world, more actively spreading good news about the United States while more aggressively addressing bad news.

But Ms. Hughes herself has said that hers was “the work of generations,” an imposing challenge at a time when the United States was fighting wars in two Muslim countries and when terms like waterboarding and names like Abu Ghraib have entered the world’s vocabulary.

Opinion polls indicate that the image of the United States in Muslim countries — the chief target of Ms. Hughes’s labors — has not improved, and in some cases has deteriorated, since she took office two years ago.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in announcing Ms. Hughes’s planned departure today, praised her for making public diplomacy “strong and central to American foreign policy,” adding, “She has done just a remarkable job.”

Public diplomacy efforts toward the Muslim world, propelled to prominence by the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, got off to a slow start.

One of Ms. Hughes’s predecessors, Charlotte Beers, came to the post from the advertising world and had scant foreign experience. Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, a Republican leader on foreign policy who tends to weigh his words, said in 2003 that United States efforts to improve the American image among Muslims had been “all thumbs.”

Ms. Beers was succeeded by Margaret Tutwiler, a former State Department spokeswoman, who lasted just five months.

Ms. Hughes herself lacked extensive foreign experience, though she speaks some Spanish, learned as a child when her father was governor of the Panama Canal Zone.

But she was considered to have one major advantage over her predecessors: her close ties to President Bush, forged when he was governor of Texas and she was his director of communications, and strengthened further when she accompanied him to the White House in the same role. She left that job in 2002 to spend more time at home with her family.

Photo

Karen P. Hughes, with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, announced her decision to resign as the head of public diplomacy at the State Department.Credit
J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press

But she returned to the administration in mid-2005 to become undersecretary of state for public diplomacy.

Sensing that bad news and sometimes baseless rumors about the United States were being allowed to spread unchallenged in Muslim countries while good news was not actively presented, Ms. Hughes sharply increased the number of interviews American officials, including Arabic speakers, gave to the Arabic news media. She said she was tired of seeing the president presented as a “caricature.”

Ms. Hughes established rapid-response centers to respond to unfavorable developments overseas. The department’s public diplomacy budget swelled, nearly doubling to $900 million a year. She promoted cultural and educational exchanges, added summer camps and English classes for young Muslims, and traveled tirelessly, explaining to all who would listen — particularly women — that Americans are people of faith.

But her travels had mixed results. She was credited for her vigor, care and the sweep of her efforts. But she was mocked at times for gaffes or misreadings of local sentiment.

Shortly after taking up her job, she told an audience of 500 Saudi women that she hoped some day they would be able to drive and “fully participate in society”; but many of the women expressed resentment at the American assumption that everyone wanted to live like them.

Just in the past week, many Canadians were annoyed that a new welcome-to-America video, proudly posted on Ms. Hughes’s blog on the State Department web site, used images of the Horseshoe portion of Niagara Falls, which is entirely within Canada.

The overall gains made in public diplomacy during Ms. Hughes’s tenure are difficult to assess. Perceptions abroad of the United States are formed mainly by wars, foreign policy, direct contacts and popular culture, not by diplomacy.

By one measure at least — public opinion surveys — there has been little progress from 2005, when the percentages of people in many Muslin countries who had favorable views of the United States were running in the single digits.

“Over the course of her term, the image of the United States has not improved among Muslim countries and, in fact, in some Muslim countries, particularly Turkey, it has become markedly less positive,” said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center. “This may not be a measure of her lack of competence, but how little, in the end, public diplomacy can do when the issue, in the end, is big events.”

Ms. Hughes told The Associated Press that in her travels, Muslims and Arabs she spoke to generally raised the issue of the Iraq war only after mentioning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She said she advised President Bush and Secretary Rice that resolving that conflict would do more than anything to improve American standing among Muslims.

Ms. Rice plans to hold a conference later this year in Annapolis, Md., to press for progress toward Middle East peace.

Two other members of the president’s Texas inner circle have left the White House this year, Dan Bartlett and Karl Rove. Ms. Hughes said she had told Ms. Rice before accepting the State Department post that she did not plan to serve to the end of Mr. Bush’s term.